Naval Academy Museum to close Mondays for furloughs

Naval Academy's Joseph Nicholson Home and bandstand, which is one of the stops on the United States Naval Academy's walking tour called "Seas, Lakes & Bay: The Naval War of 1812 Bicentennial."

Naval Academy's Joseph Nicholson Home and bandstand, which is one of the stops on the United States Naval Academy's walking tour called "Seas, Lakes & Bay: The Naval War of 1812 Bicentennial." (Sun photo by Barbara Haddock Taylor)

The museum in Preble Hall, normally a seven-day operation, will be closed on Mondays through Sept. 29, an academy spokeswoman said Friday. It will remain open Tuesday through Sunday.

The "Seas, Lakes & Bay: The Naval War of 1812" exhibit in Mahan Hall will remain open seven days a week, spokeswoman Jenny Erickson said. The academy said earlier Friday that the exhibit, too, would close on Mondays.

Some 45,000 Defense Department employees in Maryland are being furloughed one day per week in each of the next 11 weeks to help the Pentagon save $37 billion as required to meet the across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester.

The unpaid leave is scheduled to continue through the end of the fiscal year in September.

The furloughs will hit as many as 650,000 civilian defense workers nationwide. In Maryland, they will affect personnel at nearly every military facility, including as many as 27,000 employees at Fort Meade, about 4,900 at Fort Detrick and 2,400 at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Uniformed military personnel are exempt, but the cuts are expected to have impacts on operations and the local economy.